A Double Life

By J. Michael Lennon

(Simon & Schuster; 947 pages; $40)

Mind of an Outlaw

Selected Essays

In an essay he wrote in the mid-1980s, Norman Mailer discusses the mind-set that contributed to his success. "The Hazards and Sources of Writing" offers a glimpse at his unlikely rivalry with Kurt Vonnegut, but it's essentially a pep talk, to his fellow writers and to Mailer himself. Critics and naysayers, he advises, are best ignored: "Every good author who has managed to forge a long career must be able ... to build a character that will not be unhinged by a bad reception. That takes a rugged disposition."

Mailer, of course, loved to pat himself on the back for being tough, but the truth is, he had a harder shell than most. He needed it. Famously, he lived a bigger, more chaotic life than any of his peers, and throughout, his confidence - or to put it less generously, his untrammeled self-regard - sustained him.

Two publishers have brought out big books devoted to Mailer's many adventures.

J. Michael Lennon's "Norman Mailer: A Double Life" is a perceptive biography, one with a keen understanding of his work, his mind and his darkest impulses (notably, the stabbing of his second wife). "Mind of an Outlaw" is a collection of essays - "The Hazards and Sources of Writing" is one of almost 50 - that encompasses Mailer's writing days, from the 1940s to the 2000s. Together, the books depict a brilliant, reckless agitator who believed he deserved a spot alongside the 20th century's greatest artists.

"Mailer wanted his books to be the literary equivalent of Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring,' or Picasso's 'Guernica,' " Lennon writes, "works that would alter the course of artistic history."

Lennon worked with Mailer on several books, but "A Double Life" is an evenhanded effort, one that doesn't elide or make excuses for its subject's misdeeds. In many aspects of life, Lennon writes, Mailer had paradoxical identities. He married six times, and enjoyed family life, but even in his later years, Mailer was an unfaithful husband. He was a man of words, but when words weren't enough, he resorted to the most primal of attacks, the head-butt (Gore Vidal and an unnamed Watergate burglar - it's not the punch line to a 40-year-old joke, but a partial list of those who're said to have absorbed one of Mailer's cranial assaults).

In his working life, as well, Mailer was of two minds. He summoned the empathy required to create multifaceted fictional characters, yet his nonfiction could be tiresomely self-referential. And though he often basked in his celebrity, Mailer had the discipline to withdraw from the public eye and put in the long days necessary to churn out 50-page magazine articles and 1,000-page books.

In keeping with Mailer's dueling affinities, "A Double Life" pivots back and forth between his work and his fame.

Of particular interest are Lennon's chapters on the narrative architecture behind Mailer's novels. During his World War II hitch in the Pacific, he sent a series of letters to his future wife Bea, laying out the themes he would explore in his 1948 debut, "The Naked and the Dead." Mailer, Lennon says, "wrote out the names of 161 soldiers he had known since he had been in the army. He had already selected eight of his principal characters, but needed more and wanted the largest possible pool from which to draw."

There's no denying, however, that the book's most memorable parts concern Mailer's after-hours exertions. As cataloged by Lennon, it's a list that included "nude beach parties" thrown by esteemed critic Dwight Macdonald; cocktails with "From Here to Eternity" author James Jones, who "did flips on a trampoline, boxed, and drank martinis at lunch to loosen up"; jogging with Muhammad Ali; an argument with McGeorge Bundy that ended only after Mailer challenged the presidential adviser to a fistfight; and his famous tiffs with Vidal, William Styron, Arthur Miller, et al.

Robert Lowell, Lennon notes, once called Mailer "the best journalist in America." The essays in "Mind of an Outlaw" attest to his mighty intellect and his gifts as a nonfiction stylist, but it's not a revelatory collection. A short essay on Freud appears to be the book's only previously unpublished entry, and many of its best-known pieces - among them, "The White Negro," his 1957 rumination on race, rebellion and "the psychic havoc" produced by World War II; and "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," in which he scrutinizes JFK's presidential campaign - have been widely available for years.

Still, in terms of what they say about Mailer at various points in his career, some of the pieces are as telling as anything in Lennon's bio. In one of his columns for the Village Voice, a publication he co-founded in 1955, Mailer addressed his reasons for filing a weekly dispatch. Among them: "Egotism. My search to discover in public how much of me is sheer egotism." A bit of self-satire? Probably. But more than a kernel of truth, too.